America, Have You Lost Your Mind, or Is It Your Soul?: Can’T You Remember the Faith of Your Fathers, or Do You Want To?

CHAPTER 1

In the Beginning God . . .

Anytime we delve into history, it would perhaps be a good idea to mention the One who is and was always there. A thorough and complete history of anything or any place would not be all that it could be without it.

There is an exceptionally beneficial and fruitful advantage to be derived from a study of the past. There you see, set in the clear light of historical truth, examples of every possible type. From these you can select for yourself and your country what to imitate, and also what, as being mischievous in its inception and disastrous in its consequences, you should avoid. (Titus Livius [Livy], Ab Urbe Condita, preface)

Ignorance of the past is dangerous. We must be informed about our history and the world, otherwise, we can be manipulated by those who corrupt the truth and use it against us. Our past helps to guide our future, so we must be prepared to base our plan on the foundations laid before us.

I propose the true foundation and plan for the United States of America was in place centuries before Columbus, de Soto, or any of the other explorers set foot in this part of the world. As a matter of fact, I made a statement several years ago that, just as the land of Canaan was the Promised Land for the Jews, America was the Promised Land for Christians.

The search for a place where one could worship the Creator as described in John 1:1-3, in freedom and without fear of persecution, began in the early days of what we call the Common Era (CE), formerly anno Domini (AD), or after death.

Jewish Christians were persecuted in their own country. One of their fiercest persecutors was a man named Saul of Tarsus, a member of the Pharisees and a Roman citizen. With the blessing of the leaders of the Jewish church, he hunted down Christian converts. He was present at the stoning and martyring of Stephen. Ironically, after his encounter with Jesus Christ when he was temporarily blinded, he became a powerful advocate of Christianity, evangelist, and church organizer. All of Christ’s apostles, except John (the author of the books of St. John, 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, and Revelation), were martyred.

Long before this, starting with Adam and Eve, we find the main problem man had, and still has today, is a lack of respect for authority. God plainly told Adam and Eve they had full freedom to do as they pleased and to take full advantage of the bounty of their beautiful home in the garden of Eden. The only thing forbidden to them was to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. But Eve was beguiled by the Serpent (Satan), took the fruit from the tree, and shared it with Adam.

Through the ages, the form or level of authority has varied, but there have always been those who rebelled. For many generations, God dealt with his creation directly, but eventually he delegated some responsibility to various entities. God chose Moses to lead the Jews out of Egypt, and they rebelled against him time and again. It was extremely frustrating trying to be the authority figure, dealing with the rebellious Israelites, so Moses went up on the mountain and asked for God’s help in setting up some consistent and solid guidelines to present to the people. Out of this came the Ten Commandments. This gave the people a clear-cut, concise set of rules that applied equally to everyone. But people broke them and looked for exceptions to the rules. Does this sound familiar? Later, the tribe of Levi was designated as priests to help teach and counsel the people. Eventually, they were given judges, and then they insisted on having a king. Still, they always had a problem with authority.

The Roman Empire became a factor in the region, and it conquered Israel and most of the other countries. Jesus Christ had come in the meantime, and the Christian church had begun to grow. The Christians were persecuted at home, but they were also persecuted by their own people in Rome. It became so disruptive that the Jews were expelled from Rome in 51 CE.

But in the year 61, Emperor Nero blamed the fire that destroyed much of Rome on the Christians. He persecuted the churches ruthlessly and even used Christians as candles to light his garden. By the year 66, the Christians and Jews had separated into their own subcultures. The Palestinian Jews were still under Roman rule, and because they still resented it, they revolted.

At this time, there may have been more non-Jews or, as they were called then, Gentiles, than Jewish Christians. Wherever and whomever they were, they were persecuted—the Jewish Christians by their fellow Jews and the Gentiles by whatever authority they fell under: Greek, Roman, Persian, and so on.

This excerpt from the writings of Tacitus, from Annals 15.44, in the early second century, gives a description of some of the treatment at the hands of the Romans.

To kill the rumours, Nero charged and tortured some people for their evil practices—the group popularly known as Christians . . . their deadly superstition had been suppressed temporarily, but was beginning to spring up again—not now just in Judea but even in Rome itself where all kinds of sordid and shameful activities are attracted and catch on.

First, those who confessed to being Christians were arrested. Then, from information obtained from them, hundreds were convicted, more for their anti-social beliefs than for rebellion. In their deaths they were made a mockery. They were covered in skins of wild animals, torn to death by dogs, crucified or set on fire—so that when darkness fell they burned like torches in the night . . . . As a result, although they were guilty of being Christians and deserved death, people began to feel sorry for them.

There was a major change in the third century when the first recognized church and state incident was recognized. In AD 330 the subject on everyone’s mind in the so-called Roman Empire was that Rome had fallen. But a New Rome, the city of Constantinople, stood firm. Here, the vision of the emperor Constantine—of a perfect Christian state, with the emperor presiding over civil and religious life—was realized.

From the founding of Constantinople by Constantine the Great to the fall of the city to the Ottomans in 1453, the Byzantine Empire endured for 1,123 years and 18 days. During this time, there was inevitable great change, both social and political, yet the degree of cultural uniformity throughout that time is striking. That was due in large part to the central role Christianity played in the empire.

In contrast to this was what transpired in old Rome and the surrounding areas of Spain, France, and Germany. In the year 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne head of the Holy Roman Empire (aka the Nominally Christian Germanic Kingdom). His dynasty is called the Carolingian Empire. His reign is the cultural high point of the early Middle Ages.

It also was the beginning of almost one thousand years of the blurred line between emperor and pope. There seemed to be no separation of church and state. There was a strained relationship between the people in power. The perceived need for a political leader and a religious leader led to an uneasy arrangement. When there was a powerful emperor, he chose and anointed the pope. When the standing pope was more powerful, he chose the next emperor.

The Crusades

There was something else during this time that deserves attention. Pope Urban II (1088-1099) called the Council of Clermont in 1095. He asked for Christians in Europe to assist the Byzantine Christians in the East. Men from all over the area responded in a series of crusades.

The Crusades were a series of military conflicts conducted by European Christian knights for control over the lucrative trade routes running through the Middle East and establishment of European, but not necessarily Christian, influence in the region. However, many historians write that its purposes were to defend Christians and expand Christian domains.

Generally, the Crusades refer to the campaigns in the Holy Land against Muslim forces sponsored by the papacy. There were other crusades against Islamic forces in southern Spain, southern Italy, and Sicily, as well as the campaigns of Teutonic knights against pagan strongholds in northeastern Europe. A few crusades, such as the Fourth Crusade, were waged within Christendom against groups that were considered heretical and schismatic. Krak des Chevaliers was built in the country of Tripoli by the Knights Hospitaller during the Crusades.

The Holy Land had been part of the Roman Empire, and thus Byzantine Empire, until the Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries. Thereafter, Christians had generally been permitted to visit the sacred places in the Holy Land until 1071, when the Seljuk Turks closed Christian pilgrimages and assailed the Byzantines, defeating them at the Battle of Manzikert. Emperor Alexius I asked for aid from Pope Urban II for help against Islamic aggression. He probably expected money from the pope for the hiring of mercenaries. Instead, Urban II called on the knights of Christendom in a speech made at the Council of Clermont on November 27, 1095, to combine the idea of pilgrimage to the Holy Land with that of waging a holy war against infidels.

The First Crusade captured Antioch in 1099 and then Jerusalem. The Second Crusade occurred in 1145, when Islamic forces retook Edessa. Jerusalem would be held until 1187 and the Third Crusade, famous for the battles between Richard the Lionheart and Saladin. The Fourth Crusade, begun by Innocent III in 1202, was intended to retake the Holy Land but was soon subverted by Venetians, who used the forces to sack the Christian city of Zara. Eventually, the crusaders arrived in Constantinople. Rather than proceeding to the Holy Land, the crusaders instead sacked Constantinople and other parts of Asia Minor, effectively establishing the Latin Empire of Constantinople in Greece and Asia Minor. This was effectively the last crusade sponsored by the papacy; individuals sponsored later crusades. Thus, though Jerusalem was held for nearly a century and other strongholds in the Near East would remain in Christian possession much longer, the crusades in the Holy Land ultimately failed to establish permanent Christian kingdoms.

Islamic expansion into Europe would renew and remain a threat for centuries, culminating in the campaigns of Suleiman the Magnificent in the sixteenth century. On the other hand, the crusades in southern Spain, southern Italy, and Sicily eventually lead to the demise of Islamic power in the regions; the Teutonic Knights expanded Christian domains in Eastern Europe, and the much less frequent crusades within Christendom, such as the Albigensian Crusade, achieved their goal of maintaining doctrinal unity.

There are many stories, both positive and negative, about the Crusades that we could discuss. We will move on, however, and come back to the subject of the Islamic story later.¹

The Reformation

Western Europe had just gone through roughly a thousand years of Catholic culture, where the church dominated every facet of society. Now as the Middle Ages began the development of the early modern period, that dominance was broken and the most dramatic shake-up in religious history since Constantine imposed the Holy Roman mantle on the empire began.

The Reformation came about during the period known as the Renaissance, which lasted from about the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. Europe was devastated by plague during the fourteenth century and early fifteenth century. The whole area changed during the period.

Not only was the society affected by the sickness, death, and monetary hardships, but there was a religious change brewing. An information revolution was started where ideas could travel faster, which aided the Reformation. The Renaissance brought about an element of religious renewal. Christianity was reinterpreted with a Neoplatonic mysticism element. Ironically, the old traditions of philosophy and spirituality were still around, and the best description of this situation was found in The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. This book came from a tradition of Christ-centered mysticism which came from the developments of the later Middle Ages. The book was deeply ingrained with the principles of personal integrity and devotion to Christ. Here is a sample of the work:

If a man knows what it is to love Jesus, then he is really blessed. We have to abandon all we love for the one we love, for Jesus wants us to love him only above all things. Whether you will or no, you must one day leave everything behind. Keep yourself close to Jesus in life as well as death, commit yourself to his faithfulness, for he only can help you when everything else will fail.

There were many and varied causes for the Reformation and many people were involved, but the catalyst seemed to be Martin Luther. That’s the name that most often comes to mind when this period is mentioned. Luther, sometimes called the German Hercules, was born in the village of Eisleben in 1483 and became an Augustinian monk at an unusually young age. He began to teach at the university at Wittenburg in 1508.

He began to have problems with the use of penance. He found that the practice of granting penance was being abused by certain figures in the church. They were actually putting a price on the indulgences. Initially Luther’s intention was to bring the situation to a debate, but his Ninety-Five Theses started a storm in the church. He later wrote, What I did toppled heaven and consumed earth by fire.

The hierarchy of the church turned Luther’s concerns over corruption and misuse of indulgences into one about the authority of the pope. They insisted that the pope was divinely appointed and had divine authority. Luther wrote, in the preface to his complete works, I began to understand that in this verse (Roman1:17) ‘the righteousness of God’ means the way in which a righteous person lives through a gift of God—that is, by faith. I began to understand that this verse means that the righteousness of God is revealed through the Gospel, but it is a passive righteousness—that is, it is that by which the merciful God makes us righteous by faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous person lives by faith.’ All at once I felt that I had been born again and entered into paradise itself through open gates. Immediately I saw the whole of Scripture in a different light.

Luther and his group of like thinkers felt compelled to clarify their views, hoping to create an agreed set of doctrines for all Protestants. In 1530, Philip Melanchthon worked with Luther to revise an earlier set of doctrinal statements that they had produced. This came to be known as the Augsburg Confession. Here is an excerpt from it:

Also [we] teach that men cannot be justified before God by their own strength, merits, or works, but are freely justified for Christ’s sake, through faith, when they believe that they are received into favour, and that their sins are forgiven for Christ’s sake, who, by His death, has made satisfaction for our sins. This faith God imputes for righteousness in His sight.

And from the intro to his Commentary on Galatians:

In my heart reigns this one article, faith in my dear Lord Christ, the beginning, middle, and end of whatever spiritual and divine thoughts I may have, whether by day or by night.

After Luther lead the first generation of Reformers, his successor was likely John Calvin. Calvin stayed mostly around Geneva, Switzerland, which became a kind of Protestant theocracy. Through Calvin’s leadership, the city was transformed into the leading center of Protestant thought—some called it the Protestant Rome. Calvin developed a new understanding of the Protestant faith through his sermons and writings, including his Institutes of the Christian Religion. Through this work, he sought to offer the Christian faith in a systematic way, all based on the Holy Bible.

The movement and efforts of Calvin became the basis of the Reformed Church. The development of Calvinism—the movement started and inspired by his theology—spread into the whole area of Christian traditions. The Reformed Church in the end enjoyed more success than the Lutheran Church, which was mostly a German-speaking group in western Europe. It spread over most of Europe, including Scotland and the Netherlands. The theological tensions grew until not only the churches turned on each other, it spread to the general public and eventually into war. In 1572 alone, the civil war in France with different factions clashing over control resulted in the Catholic troops killing twenty thousand Protestant civilians in Paris and throughout France. At the Saint Bartholomew Massacre, as it was called, was the spark that later led to the Thirty Years War. It spread over most of Europe and it is estimated that between 1618 and 1648, the population of the Hapsburg empire, devastated by not only the fighting but by disease and the starvation that followed, dropped in population from 21 million to 13.5 million.

One of the great accomplishments of Calvin’s group was the Geneva Bible. The Geneva translators produced a revised New Testament in English in 1557 that was essentially a revision of Tyndale’s revised and corrected 1534 edition. Much of the work was done by William Whittingham, the brother-in-law of John Calvin. The Geneva New Testament was barely off the press when work began on a revision of the entire Bible, a process that took more than two years. The new translation was checked with Theodore Beza’s earlier work and the Greek text.

After the death of Mary in England, Elizabeth was crowned queen in 1558, once again moving the country toward Protestantism. In 1560 a complete revised Bible was published, translated according to the Hebrew and Greek, and conferred with the best translations in diverse languages, and dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I. The Geneva Bible was finally printed in England in 1575 only after the death of Archbishop Matthew Parker, editor of the Bishop’s Bible. [I have an edition of the 1599 Geneva Bible.]

It seemed that after the initial impact of the Reformation began to wane, the Protestant churches went into a long period of restructuring. During the latter section of the sixteenth century and most of the seventeenth, which was called the Age of Confessionalism, the different groups became more focused on their individual beliefs, or confessions, in contrast to the other churches. This practice has been called Protestant Scholasticism, where the churches concentrated more on outlining in more detail their own doctrines, developing terminology to describe them more accurately. This had been done centuries before to a different degree. Eventually, their discussions became dull and technical. Part of what Luther had tried to do was to overturn centuries of the medieval definitions and descriptions and focus more on the New Testament teachings. Calvin is normally thought of as a more systematic thinker and theologian. However, his Institutes of the Christian Religion, despite its precise topics, was supposed to be simply a faithful exposition of the Bible. Their followers were going further in their categorical definitions and specifications of the Protestant principle of the Scripture alone, but digging further for answers to questions not found in the Bible.

The prime example was the question of predestination and the relationship between grace and free will. This seemed to be the hottest topic being discussed at the time by both Protestants and Catholics. The Protestants were quite comfortable using Aristotle’s terminology and held Aquinas in high regard as an authority on theological themes.

One of the key figures in these developments, although he isn’t mentioned in a lot of stories on this period, is Theodore Beza. He was a Calvinist theologian and was quite active, writing profusely. Beza’s New Testament went through five editions during his lifetime. In 1556 he published an annotated Latin translation of the New Testament, adding the Greek text in 1565. The work was intended to replace Eramus’s Greek text, Latin translation, and annotations which Beza considered doctrinally and textually unsound.

Beza, an aristocratic Frenchman, who was only ten years younger than Calvin, outlived him by forty years and was widely regarded as the great man’s natural successor. It was Beza, rather than Calvin, who was regarded by most Reformed theologians of the seventeenth century as the theological authority, and he was especially good at recasting the terminology of Aristotle and the medieval scholastics in disputing with his opponents, both Lutheran and Catholic. It was Beza who defined the doctrine of predestination and its role in the Reformed theology.

The Church of England

During this time of adjustment and search for definition, the church which played a great part in the formation of the American colonies was growing in the British Isles. The Anglican Church held a peculiar position in the midst of these church developments. Historically, it was a Protestant church, created in the 1530s when King Henry VIII essentially took control of the existing Catholic Church in England. The Lutheran sympathies of its advisers, such as Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell, had influenced the new church, but the Catholic tendencies of the later monarchs such as Charles I and churchmen such as William Laud had their effect also.

They fought over a number of things, such as the Prayer Book, switching from episcopacy to Presbyterianism, not to mention the long list of monarchs who took control of the church. Each one had their own leanings. One may favor the Roman Catholic while the next might claim the Protestant mantle.

The main thing that led to the numbers of citizens to flee to the Netherlands and later to America was the persecution of those who didn’t adhere to the central Church’s control. There was no opportunity to freely choose your own way to worship.

Exploration

During this period, some very important things were happening in the other parts of the world. Actually, a new world was being carved out of the wilderness. The European countries had burst into a very competitive quest for God, glory and gold. They had developed a thirst for exploration and the possible bounties that lay in the uncharted areas of the world. Adventurers such as Marco Polo had been to places such as Cathay (China), and they brought tales of riches and also spices, dyes, rugs, and silk. The only thing keeping everyone from running to these distant foreign lands to bring the bounty back was it required very long treks over land routes. Along the way they could expect to encounter bandits, and demands of tribute or exorbitant taxes from the rulers of the many lands they must cross.

Everyone was excited by the prospects, but the costs and perils made it almost impossible to pursue them. The answer had to be by way of the oceans. Sailing and shipbuilding methods had been progressing rapidly around the beginning of the tenth century, primarily because of the Arabs’ development of the astrolabe. This was a device with a pivoted limb that established the sun’s altitude above the horizon. During the tenth century, the technology made it to Spain.²

Meanwhile the Vikings to the north had been advancing new methods of hull construction for their boats. By overlapping the planks for internal support, they were able to withstand the violent storms sometimes encountered at sea. The sailors of the Hanseatic League states had been experimenting with larger ship designs that incorporated sternpost rudders for better control. Thanks to the Italian seamen generating more accurate maps, the pieces were falling into place to encourage long-distance voyages. A new generation of explorers was now equipped and ready for the opportunities that the various monarchs were eager to support.³

In addition, the Protestant Reformation fostered a fierce and bloody competition for power and territory between Catholic and Protestant nations. England competed for land with Spain, not just for economic and political reasons, but because the English feared the possibility that Spain might catholicize numbers of non-Christians in new lands, whereas Catholics feared the prospect of subjecting natives to Protestants heresies. For these reasons, even though the economic or political gains of discovery and colonization may have been marginal, monarchs had strong religious incentives to open their royal treasuries and support these missions.

Portugal and Spain had a very sharp competition going on for exploration. Ironically, Portugal’s king had refused to support Christopher Columbus. Now, in August of 1492, Columbus departed from Spain, laying a course due west. A native of Genoa, Italy, Columbus represented the finest combination of the new group of navigators. He was bold and confident that he knew what he was after and was capable of completing his quest. Like anyone, he wanted glory, and after being denied an opportunity before, he was motivated by a sort of desperation to prove himself. At the same time, he was earnestly desirous of taking Christianity to heathen lands.⁴ Contrary to an old and often repeated story, he didn’t originate the theory that the earth was round. Many people of the era thought the same way. He was the first to test the theory.

As we know, he took three boats, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria with a crew of ninety men. They set sail in August 1492 with the plan of sailing to Japan. There was some anxiety and doubt amongst the crew after ten weeks, but Columbus managed to keep them together. At last on October 11, 1492, the weary, but excited crew began to see pieces of wood covered with barnacles, green bulrushes, and other vegetation.⁵ The lookout spotted land, and on October 12, 1492, the courageous band walked ashore on Watling Island in the Bahamas, where the men begged Columbus’s pardon for doubting him.⁶

Columbus then sailed on to Cuba, which he called Hispaniola. He thought he had actually reached the Far East, and described the dark-skinned people he found in Hispaniola as Indians. He found them to be very well-formed, with handsome bodies and good faces, and hoped to convert them ‘to our Holy Faith by love rather than by force’ by giving them red caps and glass beads ‘and many other things of small value.’"⁷ He dispatched emissaries into the interior to contact the Great Khan, but they returned with no reports of spices, jewels, silks, or other evidence of Cathay; nor did the Khan send his regards. In spite of these disappointments, Columbus returned to Spain confident he had found an ocean passage to the Orient.⁸

Columbus was gradually forced to face the reality the he had not reached India or China, and after a second voyage in 1493—still convinced he was in the Pacific Ocean—he admitted he had stumbled on a new landmass, perhaps even a new continent of astounding natural resources and wealth. In February 1493, he wrote his Spanish patrons that Hispaniola and all the other islands like it were fertile to an endless degree, possessing mountains covered by trees of a thousand kinds and tall, so that they seem to touch the sky.⁹ He confidently promised gold, cotton, spices—as much as Their Highnesses should command—in return for only minimal continued support. Meanwhile, he continued to probe the Mundus Novus south and west. After returning to Spain, Columbus made two more voyages to the New World in 1498 and 1502.

Whether Columbus had found a route to the Far East or a whole new land was not as important to most Europeans as the political events of the day. Spain had just accomplished the eviction of the Muslims after the long Reconquista, and England’s Wars of the Roses had scarcely ended. Only a few merchant explorers and dreamers were focused on Columbus’s discoveries. The prospect of finding a water passage to Asia still infatuated sailors, however, and in 1501 a Florentine passenger on a Portuguese voyage, by the name of Amerigo Vespucci, wrote letters to his friends describing a New World.

His self-promoting letters circulated quicker than Columbus’s written accounts and, as a result, the name America became the term geographers attached to the lands in the western hemisphere that should rightfully have been called Columbia.

But even though Columbus received only a relatively small monetary reward and little name recognition except the title from Spain of Admiral of the Ocean Sea, he had someone who would take care of the historical register. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison, a worthy seaman in his own right, who reenacted the Columbian voyages in 1939 and 1940, described Columbus as the sign and symbol [of the] new age of hope, glory and accomplishment.¹⁰

It was said of Columbus that, He came as a religious man, an admiral of Christ, to find the continent, not for its material treasures, but because it held souls which he wished to bring as a trophy to the feet of Christ.¹¹

Benjamin F. Morris had a much more detailed story to tell of Columbus:

A deep religious feeling mingled with his meditations and gave them at times a tinge of superstition, but it was of a sublime and lofty kind. He looked upon it as being in the hand of Heaven, chosen from among men for the accomplishment of its high purpose; he read, as he supposed, his contemplated discoveries foretold in the mystic revelations of the prophets. The ends of the earth were to be brought together, and all nations and tongues and languages united under the banner of the Redeemer. This was to be the triumphant consummation of his enterprise, bringing the unknown regions of the earth into communion with Christian Europe—carrying the light of the true faith into benighted and pagan lands, and gathering their countless nations under the holy dominion of the Church. One of his principal objects was undoubtedly the propagation of the Christian faith. Columbus now considered himself about to effect this great work—to spread the light of revelation to the very ends of the earth, and thus to be the instrument of accomplishing one of the sublime predictions of Holy Writ.

Whenever he made any great discovery, he celebrated it by solemn thanks to God. The voice of prayer and melody of praise rose from his ship when they first beheld the New World, and his first act on landing was to prostrate himself upon the earth and return thanksgiving. All his great enterprises were undertaken in the name of the Holy Trinity, and he partook of the communion before his embarkation. His conduct was characterized by the grandeur of his views and the magnanimity of his spirit. Instead of scouring the newly found countries, like a grasping adventurer, eager only for immediate gain, as was too general with contemporaneous discoverers, he sought to ascertain their soil and productions, their rivers and harbors: he was desirous of colonizing and cultivating them, conciliating and civilizing the natives, introducing the useful arts, subjecting everything to the control of law, order, and religion, and thus of founding regular and prosperous empires.

In his will, Columbus enjoins on his son Diego, or whoever might inherit after him, to spare no pains in having and maintaining in the island of Hispaniola four good professors of theology, to the end and aim of their studying and laboring to convert to our holy faith the inhabitants of the Indias; and, in proportion as by God’s will the revenue of the estate shall increase, in the same degree shall the number of teachers and devout persons increase, who are to strive to make Christians of the natives.¹²

Noah Webster had this view of Columbus:

The great epitaph, commemorative of the character and the worth, the discoveries and the glory of Columbus, was that he had given a new world to the crowns of Castile and Aragon. This is a great mistake. It does not come up to all the great merits of Columbus. He gave the territory of the Southern hemisphere to the crowns of Castile and Aragon; but, as a place for the plantation of colonies, as a place for the habitation of men, a place to which laws and religion, and manners and science, were to be transferred, as a place where the creatures of God should multiply and fill the earth under friendly skies and with religious hearts, he gave it to the whole world, he gave it to universal man!

From this seminal principle, and from a handful, a hundred saints, blessed of God and ever honored of men, landed on the shores of Plymouth and elsewhere along the coast, united with the settlement of Jamestown, has sprung this great people.¹³

Notes

1. Jonathan Hill, History of Christianity, also called Zondervan, Handbook of Christianity, Grand Rapids (Lion Publishing (2006) 206-210.

2. Eric L. Jones, The European Miracle (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

3. James Burke, Connections (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), 122-23. Carlo Cipolla, Guns, Sails and Empires: Technological Innovations and the Early Phases of European Expansion, 1400-1700 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965).

4. Esmond Wright, The Search for Liberty: From Origins to Independence (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 15.

5. Christopher Columbus, The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America,